Saturday, June 30, 2012

After eons of use, a broken heart continues to survive as an apt metaphor. Along with its adjectival—heart-breaking—use, broken heart remains the go-to description for a loss or disappointment of wrenching, epic intensity. In its simplicity is the artful descriptive conveyance of raised and dashed hopes, the pottery of dreams in shards, the promise of connection to a vision or another person as forlorn as two unmatching sox in a drawer.

Broken heart, as a trope, also reminds you on a daily basis of two essentials to being a writer:

1)the number of times every day you are disappointed as a writer and as a person
2)the ongoing need as a writer and as a person to remain vulnerable to having your heart broken.

Without openness to experience and the potential any experience has for immediate explosion or meltdown or entropy, you are no longer a witness and thus you have no miracle to reflect upon and report, no illusion to be shattered or exposed, no expectation for some small ragamuffin of extraordinary beauty and impact to invite your senses to dance.

Being thus vulnerable is not without risk. You will be seen as moody, melodramatic, self-important, all things you in fact become when the right stimulus pickpockets your wallet of propriety. When a dog with a worried expression or a cat seeming to be trapped on a ledge become reminders that the jungle out there of hyperbole is never far from encroaching, you are of course moody for unknown things outside yourself When a publisher speaks of your next project after the next one you owe, you strike poses from Verdi and Rossini and Mozart opera, flamboyant, Italian. How are you not self-important when filled with visions you wish to share, fearful you cannot convey the grace and individuality of a particular thing, a particular place, a person who radiates the quality of a cornflower volunteered within a sidewalk crack?

You have completed a scene in which you have set into dramatic motion everything you wish to include, well aware you held back on details that were quite dear and meaningful to you, lest you be seen as too literal, too controlling, too unwilling to trust the already heavy breathing of your details. An editor you trust will suggest things to you that seem so sure, so accurate, so achingly apt that you now wonder how you could have missed them. And your heart is broken. Yet again.

The new barista with the topaz eyes at the coffee shop meets your gaze two days in succession with an attitude that you realize, as you sip your latte, has broken your heart although you don’t quite know why. And on the third day, your heart having been broken twice, your eyes meet and there is no attitude, only recognition, and you are again devastated as you are hours later when a sentence that seemed to greet you with that same fresh, I-m-alive attitude seems to have lost something in the context of the previous sentence.

To be sure, there is no device sensitive enough to tally all the flashing music of discovery you experience during a fraction of a day, no measure of the times some nerve ending or sensory receptor sends you a letter of acceptance, informing you some part of your body enjoyed some idea or figment or sight or sound or smell. Much less yet can you account for all the thousands of times you have not even noticed “feeling good” about something although, had you not “felt good” about it, you would have noticed with that brooding ache of subsurface dissatisfaction.

Life is like the super cargo ships, laden, packed, filled. Like the cargo ships, life sometimes has unintended passengers. Certain anthropologists will speak with glee of the unintended transport throughout the world of the Norwegian brown rat or the rattus rattus black rat species species. Life has rats in some of its cargo. You have to be vulnerable to be heartbroken if you are to have any hope of seeing and trying to capture those remarkable sentences and senses and baristas with topaz eyes.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Sometimes the voices in your head remind you of a family gathering before the meal is served, tinged with hunger and impatience. Other times, the voices remind you of a faculty meeting before the agenda is addressed. The atmospheres of each is crowded with the resonance of new arguments to be explored, new jokes to be tried out, and the democratic leavening of gossip offered about as an hors d’oerve. Old complaints appear with the ant-like persistence of Ron Paul posters, appearing two days after an election.

These voices are nothing to be concerned about; you’ve heard them most of your life, although it was not until you were moving along into and beyond your teens when you realized they were mostly you in your various stages and states.

The others were a clutter of authority sorts, real and concocted by you as a kind of universal, adult “them” at whom to vent your smoldering resentments at what you called the vital lies, things you were supposed to take at face value.

Because you came up during a golden era of what you will call “radio before television,” some of the voices were of individuals you listened to for their sounds as well as their content, not yet aware that you’d have to have a range of voices much like the watercolors in your favored watercolor tin.

Some of your voices beyond parents and teachers were Aimee Macpherson, Jack Benny, George Burns, a woman named Eleanor Dean, who read stories on a local radio station, yet another evangelist, Sister Mirandy, and two men with wide differences in their voices, the nasal, twangy, Mel Lamond, and another known only as Old Pal Gus. These two were the respective voices of the Los Angeles Times, and Examiner Sunday morning comic section read. You were not at all interested in evangelism, Sisters Aimee and Mirandy had voices that informed you of places of excitement and enthusiasm within yourself you recognized but did not yet know how to articulate.

Your favorite voice of all was the nightly newscaster, Chet Huntley, whom you admired for his voice and for his political commentary, a respect that carried over when he moved to New York, then teamed with David Brinkley on the nightly NBC television news when television news had some measure of substance.

The voices are the reason you sometimes leave the quiet and comfort of home, venturing to the Café Luna in Summerland, or Peet’s on upper State Street, where the voices to be overcome are not your own but rather the voices of a wide range of others, finding themselves in need of a place to work.

You’ve not discussed this with anyone else but there is some sense you are on the right track thinking the buzz and chatter of others presents the right degree of distraction that must be overcome in order for the work to come.

Sometimes at home, one of the voices has won out and there is no need to go anywhere other than where you are, where you still have access to Peet’s coffee from your freezer, and a range of Bialetti stove-top espresso makers should you feel the need.

Voice is the way you sound when you write. Although you often hear the material as though Chet Huntley was discussing it, when you read it aloud, there are wry traces of David Brinkley present. Both men provide good platforms for putting satisfying voice into the work, getting it in shape to the point where you then remove these two so that what remains is you—all of you, or those who argue with the most force and conviction.

Whether the work at hand is fiction or nonfiction, you believe it needs a voice to impart life and attitude. Without voice, fiction and nonfiction are mere bundles of information, the fiction being more emotional information, the nonfiction carrying fact along a pathway toward a conclusion that is both informative and emotional.

You believe story without voice is every bit as much a flailing neophyte swimmer as the youngsters you see in the instructional classes at the Y. You also believe that voice without story is of a piece with a musician running scales or a dancer practicing steps or an actor doing vocal exercises.

The human experience is overloaded with conflicting and supporting techniques that allow us to present dramatic and factual information as well as to receive it. Herein reside the troubles you confront as a person and as a writer on a daily basis. You chose with care the individuals you wish to spend time with, whose works you read; you chose friends, intimates with the belief that you can understand and relate to them at the same time you provide them access to your meanings and intentions.

You are not always successful.

The work you do with story is by increased degrees of complexity more problematic because you may be telling one story in good faith while a second story or third or fourth is being received in equally good faith. You toe the high wire of ambiguity in good faith. When you slip or fall, you get up and begin again, your good faith still present but having gone through gauntlets of risk to the point where it has become now the good faith that has taken some falls, sees the potential for more, trudges on without the confidential shine and empathy it had in the beginning.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Things you once had and are now gone from you assume a
perfection they never had when they were with you.You enjoyed them then, and retain them now in
memory with that lemony sting of having undervalued them because they were so
easily come by.Even though you may well
have worked for them, it was summer light then.All things seemed easy.Even
difficult things.

Sam, the cat who saw you through your first ten or twelve
novels, became yours in that most abstract sense of the verb “to have,” when
his “owner” came to you one afternoon and said, “Well. I guess he’s your cat
now.He spends most of his time with
you.”

Part of that particular magic may have come when you gave
him a name he liked better than the name he had.Or perhaps he became your cat because of the
pure accidental choice you made in buying cans of Kitty Queen Cat Kidney as
opposed to some other brand.

You thought of Sam and his past perfection last night, when
you returned from your walk, choosing to sit in the darkened patio, sipping ice
water and cooling down.A neighborhood
cat who has been checking you out for over a year, appeared with a thump in
front of you, springing from the slight wall at your back.You first became aware of Sam’s visit when he
appeared with a thump, no doubt from the outer porch that connected your
apartment with Ray, your neighbor.

This cat, a trim and self-possessed shorthaired domestic,
could well be someone’s perfect cat, and you in fact have taken a liking to
him, but he is not Sam.What was Sam is
buried in the back yard of 4064 Woodman Avenue, Sherman Oaks, not far from the
burial site of the cat of an author of yours from the days when you were both
cat persons, in so many ways perfect in what you were doing then and in the
perfection of your dreams for what you would do as life unfolded at the same
time you strived to achieve your dreams.

You were the editor in chief of a small, growing publishing
house.The author, in large measure
through your support, was writing hardcover works of nonfiction after having
written paperback originals for the pulp markets.The author was being reviewed in The New York Times.You were being mentioned in Publishers Weekly.Sometimes, at parties held at the
author’s home at 4064 Woodman Avenue, Sherman Oaks, the author would invite you
into his work area with a wink to the other guests of editor-author secrecy
about a work in progress.There, he
would pour you a hefty measure of Martell VSOP cognac and one for himself, the exact
amount to push each of you over the edge of sobriety and into the mischief of
solemnity.“Fuck seriousness,” he would
say, clinking glasses.You of course
responded in kind.It was easy to be
serious under such circumstances.You
needed reminders about illusions.

The author wanted to be writing novels that would be
published by some of the Eastern publishers.Your illusion was that you did, too.Being editor was a step toward some unconnected wisdom or knowledge or
access to the things that would bring you back to story after having written
yourself ahead of your technique.You
were waiting for story to catch up with you, to present you with memories.

The things you strive for now are shimmering, numinous
platforms and concepts for which you reach, sometimes during walks, sometimes after
them, where, instead, neighboring cats appear, or sometimes in dreams that
cause you to lurch awake in your bed, to find yourself sitting, hand out in a
reaching gesture.These platforms and
concepts are gone before you have them as you “had” Sam, but you have had that
slight touch of a passing handclasp, the charged, static-electricity touch of a
lover with whom you “had” a relationship wherein a brief touch of a hand,
perhaps held in a theater, or escorting from a car, or merely a touch of a
momentary parting is more tender and resonant in memory than a night of
lovemaking then.

And yet you reach, both for the platforms and concepts and
for the memory of the brushing of hands, and the brief exchange of a glance,
her cobalt eyes sending and receiving understanding, connection.

Some days, good days, you see as many as two or three cosmic
truths, tangible as the brush of lover’s hands and the meeting of the
eyes.These truths are as accessible to
you as the peaches depending from the tree of the yard next door.

Now, all you have to do is find a way to use them—to get at
those peaches before they become gravid, before they fall to the ground or
attract marauding birds.

Life is filled with the imagery of imperfect things, waiting
for you to put your fingerprints on their patina, waiting for you to use them,
inviting use. This is the noir in which you live, the sad understanding that
you can never get them quite as you would have them, but trying, reaching to
get them before they fall or the birds come.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Noir story continues to be whispering in your ear that it
is, after all, about you, trying to explain that when you took your first
tentative steps along the written path, it—the entire concept of you making
your way via writing, was all about you.This was because you knew so little of yourself.

It was natural, in that condition, to “look up” information,
to read things “about” it and apply a kind of calculus that was part recipe,
part formula, and part an unquestioning faith in what you considered your education.

There was a time toward the end of your high school career
when you had considered yourself well read on the basis that you were in a
relative sense, better read than many of your contemporaries.You went on to college-level courses in which
you “studied” literature, meaning you became aware of individuals and their
work you’d not heard of before.

Ah, the arrogance of it.Only a few days ago, you came across lists of things students in England
of your approximate age then should have familiarity with.Arrogance does not put the matter with enough
force or clarity.

What you needed to do, you accomplished on a level of
competence but not significant competence.You had to learn to read for actual sense of meaning and authorial
intent, sometimes in situations where you scarcely knew your own intent.You had to feel so far off the mark of
standard you’d assumed to acquire by your mid or late twenties that you must
come to doubt you could even compete with your goals.

You were setting yourself up in part for noir.You say “in part” here because you can never
prepare for noir with complete certainty.You can recognize its nature even to the point of inviting it inside of
you to see where and how it would fit, but you cannot know the enormity of it
within you or about you until you see portions of it at play in the world about
you, within persons you know, and within that individual you’d come to despair
of knowing as much as you’d begun to despair reaching your artistic goals.This individual, of course, was, and still is
you.

It is easier to see noir in things you read and in persons
you come in contact with than it is to see into your own cavities of noir, your
storage compartments, as it were, where the first two months are free.

There were times during the ageing process when you mistook
noir for cynicism, stepping aside as if to avoid a dog dropping on a sidewalk,
but you have come to see noir as more than mere unstructured cynicism.Noir is more a sense of awareness of humanity
at all levels, struggling for things it may not achieve, then taking the sour
grapes way out, rationalizing your way toward a negotiated awareness about how
far one may dream without giving way to absolute fantasy.

Noir is not anti-romanticism, nor does it seek to discourage
such visions, rather it is the awareness that everything comes wrapped in
ultimate pain.Even too much noir is
painful because it reminds us of what we thought we had to have, how we
achieved what we had to have, and what we had to have has made of us.

Noir is one of the most difficult stories to give an
effective ending, thus so many noir stories end in death or uncertainty, others
still end with someone waking up and finding next to him or her in bed the
person who had to be had.

Noir is not all about you; noir is about the wiring and
genomes of the human condition.These
are things to be learned.You are noir,
looking at someone or something in a simple act of observation then hearing the
message being tapped out on a cellphone keyboard. It is telling you that you are no longer a
mere observer, recording this remarkable someone or something.The IM comes chirping in through your sensory
on-ramps.You have to change your
furniture because of this person or thing.

From a perspective of numbers, you are more accustomed to
the changes and planning if the remarkable thing is a story or an idea, but
even that has limitations.

In another sense, noir is all around you, daring you to find
ways to cope with the notion that you can’t quite grasp it, however close to
hand it is, however acute your abilities to capture a tangible essence of it
with words.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

There has always been noir in literature (stories where
criminal and near-criminal activity drive the behavior and expectations of the
characters).We haven’t always seen it
as such.

There has always been Marxism (you know, the worker being
exploited to produce more wealth for the overlords), but because Marx wasn’t
born until 1818, and didn’t get around to observing things for the early years
of his life, we had other names for it.

There have always been parallel lines, which in geometry
meet in infinity and which in fiction meet in the last chapter.

Noir fiction and Marxism are two dramatic lines that often
appear together in fiction, their focus on characters who might not be bright
in the bookish or academic sense, although they come with wired-in shrewdness,
street smarts, and a sense, if not a code, of fair play wherein they wish to
conduct the balance of their expected lifespan neither as one who exploits
others or is exploited by others.They
neither wish to work in the hive of academic or artistic ideas nor to avoid
work in favor of surfing the seas of idleness.They are men and women who bear the scars of some form of abuse, which
might in fact have been more social and, thus, class oriented, than physical or
sexual.They want—ah, they want to be
decent or to have the opportunity to be decent.

They are, at all costs, human, these noir characters, as
human, say, as Frank and Cora, of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.By
the time Frank and Cora have found some momentary release in the sexual
chemistry that has each clawing with desperation at the other, they have been
pushed over the line of decency to the point where each new encounter, each re-visitation
of that chemistry becomes their entry visa into the landscape of noir.Without the chemistry between Frank and Cora,
there is no story, no way out of interminable yearning.

The Cain novel—in fact, all his novels—suggest yearning for
relationships and conditions where some degree of freedom and dignity are
possible, where some kind of romantic love trumps the American nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century equivalents of arranged or forced marriages, and the
option for personal discovery and growth are not squashed.They are set in appropriate dramatic
circumstances where there are considerable barriers to these goals, and where
the subtext is an often excruciating sexual tension.

Noir literature leads us along the tracks of parallel lines from
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)to a work completed ten years earlier,
often regarded as an American classic, Desire
Under the Elms, a not—as the English would say—inappropriate comparison
because of the Frank-Cora-Nick triad in the former to the Eben-Abbie-Ephriam
configuration.If this similarity lends
weight and dignity to noir literature—and you believe it does, the canoe of
your argument has been rowed to the point where the shoreline is barely visible.Thus, these added oar strokes:

Bringing in themes from the Greek myths adds to the flavor
of the Greek Gods and demi-gods, many of whom were powerful enough to exert
their personal wishes to the point of causing chaos among the male gods and
surely causing humans to be wary of calling attention to themselves that might
incur their annoyance if not outright wrath (see, for instance, Sisyphus who,
although by some accounts a candyass, was nevertheless at one time a
king.)Note also how Greek myths
translate to the present day with little need for explanation, suggesting myths
are genomes of cultural qualities inherent in those of use now afoot in the
twenty-first century.

There are enough noir titles available from a wide spectrum
of authors to suggest some interesting possibilities, not the least of which is
that noir fiction has been buried—well, half-buried--under the living room rug
as a sub-genre, a distinction of some respect but at the same time offering an
impatient sigh as though noir were a misbehaving child.There are enough similarities, say parallel
lines, to allow inclusion of that near-perfect novella of John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, among the ranks of noir
fiction.

Noir was a term, if your memory serves, once applied to the
gothics such as Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto, and Ann Radcliff’s The
Mysteries of Udolpho, where some dramatic elements appeared to be
supernatural, but were then explained away as having natural causes.

Perhaps you are being fanciful or jumping ahead of facts,
but you believe an argument can be made for the noir novel being the male
gender equivalent of the romance, in particular the comedic romance which, despite
its name, was not so much intended to imply comedy as it was an ending that
featured one or more marriages.

You’re picking an arbitrary number, but it is fair and
accurate for you to think you’ve read at least a thousand noir novels, many of
them written by your poker and drinking friends, Day Keene and Bob Turner,
drawn not only by the particular cover art of the 1950s and 1960s massmarket
covers, but by the texts as well, taking individuals such as you, who at that
point was trying to hide the secrets of his darker side from himself, and
plunging them into situations from which extrication was not an easy chore.

You’ve in a sense been putting off two novels you see now as
noir, and perhaps this recitation of things you’ve known and suspected about noir
fiction, yourself, and the world about you will be instrumental in providing
the proper nudge, applied to the proper place.

The presence of noir, within you, within your vision, within
your work, does not preclude the presence of humor, in fact, the two seem to
you yet another pair of parallel lines which you hope will meet on your
computer screen and your note pads.

Monday, June 25, 2012

You have to be desperate in order to break away from the
comfort zone of conventional success, whatever that term, “success” might mean
to you at a given time.

Desperate may also earn quotation marks, indicating any
number of ironies, not the least of which is an inner drive to break from the
income from the relative ease of writing to formula in favor of a venture out
into the unknown, where you are in the sudden position of no immediate income
stream plus a blank computer screen, which is to say no immediate project which
will become the vehicle from your departure from the comfort zone.

Here’s what’s wrong with that picture: The projects that were bringing in the income
stream were neither inspirations, visits from the Muse, or social/moral issues
about which you felt a burning passion.
They were instead results of a long time learning some of the many
elements that comprise story. You made
the mistake of thinking you would work on these until an inspiration came
along.

You have since learned that inspirations are things persons
who do not write—or paint or act or photograph or compose—visualize as
arriving, in neat packages; say packages such as the distinctive blue Tiffany
box.

Any of the pulp things you sent off, month after month, had
the potential for what you believed you longed to write but were too frightened
to attempt. So instead, you made a few
desultory starts on “literature,” a term that deserves the quotation marks here
because you’d made it inaccessible, not real story, and in the bargain, you’d
invested it with a kind of scary surface that, once touched, would spoil. Almost without variation, you cannibalized
these intermittent bouts of literature, injected them with story, sent them
off, and began the next without realizing what you were doing, which was making
yourself desperate in a way that frightened you so severely that you were
afraid to touch fiction for a few years and had to go back into editing to seek
another word rendered in quotes, “refuge.”

By relying on something you could do well, you didn’t have
to think about fiction until it caught up with you, made you desperate without
the quotation marks, which more or less proves your point here: You have to be desperate to tell stories as
opposed to being in despair that you are not able to write stories and,
perforce, must “settle” for nonfiction.

You need to be so desperate that you read and write beyond
the notion of commercial success, which is a term that should also go into
quotation marks because of recent experiences you’ve had as an editor and a
reader, discovering works in which you had no hand or interest, works that have
been huge commercial successes.

Much as you would still like to have an occasional
commercial success, you would rather have a personal success first, meaning
you’d like to have produced something you did not think you could bring off at
first and are now quite pleased you persisted with it.

Your reading and your writing have the desperate need to
focus on dramatic rather than commercial success. You wonder how a scene has been made to pay
off. Did you learn something from
reading that scene that you can carry over into the writing of your own?

Without variation, the answer comes to you: push the dialogue, push the characters,
enhance the circumstances to the point where you are no longer using your tools
with an assured sense of result. Push
your concepts by giving them steroidal urgency and need. As you read, question yourself: Did the inner forces—inner doubts and
arguments—trump the outer ones, or was the situation the exact reverse? In that calculus, of which elements were you
the most aware—inner or outer? Do you
see a pattern you can exploit with your own people, your own circumstances,
your own conflicting moral choices?

When persons you know tell you they read for enjoyment, do
you think they put quotation marks around the word enjoyment? Do you think they enjoy seeing characters
sweat out problems they doubt they can handle?
Is there an unspoken layer of sadism in you when you read for enjoyment
with enjoyment in quotation marks?

All this has to be thought out with care in the hours when
you are away from your work stations, the one at home in front of your large
screen, the one at Peet’s where you use a lined note pad and swill away at
Espresso Forte lattes. Is your sudden
spending even more time at Café Luna because of the new barista or because it
is overall a more conducive work area?

The hours when you are not working on reading or writing are
important in the sense of being a significant entryway into your inner
life. In some ways, your attitude toward
your inner life is similar to your attitude about a story in early draft; you
are not comfortable with sharing, even though, at the proper time, sharing,
conversation, close arguments with persons you admire, find their way into the
attitudes and conflicts in your stories and the nonfiction book you’re working
at.

When Bettina asks you what you’re working on, it is one
thing to say, an essay, a review, a story.
She would think you quite daft were you to say you were working on your
inner life. Of course, you are working
on daftness as well as your inner life, your hypothesis being that it is quite
better to be daft than a curmudgeon. In
fact, now that you think about it,

You resort to daftness and lunacy and humor as anodynes to
the prickly darkness of the curmudgeon.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

In most of the more popular theories of modern behavior, if
a person does a creative thing often enough, say writing stories or poems or
novels, the individual will acquire a significant voice and vision of such
strength and originality that the individual will find an audience for her or
his work, thus earn a way to publication.

Such theories are well grounded in optimism and the not
uncommon belief that hard work pays off with positive results.

This is not to argue that hard work is unnecessary, or that
it can produce positive results such as audience, publication, and wide acceptance.Instead, this argument allows hard work to have
its virtues without the necessity of producing significance, voice, vision,
originality, or publication.

The formula under discussion here is the formula by which
virtue, if persisted in, will be rewarded; virtue will produce successful
results.

At last, you are entering the arena of personal, questioning
formula, questioning the wisdom of having an opening intent as anything more
than a hypothesis, by which you mean a supposition that the problem you are
attempting to dramatize will produce a solution somewhere in the vicinity of
the hypothesis.You’re also throwing
this into the soup:the safer the
problem, the greater the potential for the ending to be a dud.The more unthinkable and squishy the problem,
the less ease you will have in attracting any effective ending into the orbit.

The true antagonist is easy or relaxation or
confidence.You’re beginning to see that
the kinds of story most attractive to you and your approach to coping with it
involve making fun of the things that most frighten and otherwise concern you.

These are generalities, but they are instructive in the
sense that they explain why you’ve needed so long to come to grips with story
in a way where you’re beginning to feel you can get along with it, rather than
try to memorize formulas relevant to it or, indeed, to use these formulas with
the confidence that they’ll work.

Some basic elements, such as opposing forces, are not
formulae; they are necessary conditions.Although you’ve known the difference between necessary conditions and
sufficient conditions for some time, you can see where you were willing to allow
your characters stop at the sufficient condition level, rather than digging
into them to find necessary conditions.Go ahead, say it; you did not see how to get past the sufficient
condition boundary.

Dialogue has been a significant non-formula necessity, well
beyond Socratic dialogue and into the intentional pressure chamber story—at
least the stories you’ve read, digested, studied, and remember—is supposed to
be.Authors as far apart in theme and
range as, say, James Thurber (1894-1961) and Flannery O’Connor (1925-64), more
or less contemporaries, use dialogue as a cattle prod, instructing you, through
your envy of the technique of each, to push your characters (and yourself)
beyond the comfort zone and into explosive, spontaneous levels of revelation
and discovery.

Among the critical discussions applied to modern fiction,
say fiction written after World War II, are those relating to authorial intent,
some in fact arguing that being able to see or discern the intent is the way to
understand the story at levels beyond mere recognition of necessary conditions
being brought into heated discussion.

Your intent has not always been clear to you, a shadow you
were willing to hide behind under the guise of wanting to do nothing more than
entertain or amuse.But over the last
quarter century, you’ve also noticed a number of individuals being caught in
some cultural gaffe as racism or sexism or a combination of the two, trying to
defend their way out by falling back on their intent:I was only trying to have some fun.

So are you, but not with that being a get-out-of-jail-free
for being racist, sexist, or a bigot.You are trying to have considerable fun while not being a racist, bigot,
sexist.

You are trying not to hide behind anything, in particular
your own woeful lack of knowledge.Thus
you go riding off into the world you admire like the protagonist of Annie
Proulx’s splendid short story, “The Mud Below,” in which the protagonist has
found, quite by accident, his life’s work, which is to be a rider of bulls at
rodeos.

You have no brief for the rodeo in general, much less the
rodeo life, which you consider to a few notches above the polo life.You have at the writing life as the
protagonist of “The Mud Below” sees bull riding.It is not an easy life, but it is his
choice.The entire story is about many
of the shortcomings of the rodeo life, the intent of the protagonist to remain
in it, the intent of his mother to keep him out of it.

Your body bears the physical and psychical scars of a
devoted life, your limps and aches not by any means all related to writing, but
such stature as you do have has come from it, by no means from any sense of
fame in it but rather from the things you have learned, taught yourself, and
learned from others.Because of the writing
life, you’ve also learned to read at a different level, looking for and seeing
such things as intent.

To all intents and purposes, you are a cross between a naïve
and an unreliable narrator, which makes sense because you are naïve in your own
real life visions and as well you are unreliable to the point where enough of
your students recognize this about you that they are able to take it in as a
way of teaching themselves how to ride the hulking leviathan that is story.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

To experience a feeling, event, or understanding, you must
endure it, be present for it, participate rather than be a passive
observer.From your own experiences with
experience, it is often a hard-won encounter with reality, in some ways like
ingesting an anti-depressant drug because of the way memories of past pain and
suffering or their polar companions, joy and exultation, tend to level off at
the rat-tail ends of the curve.

Experience is in its way more than a catalogue of things
that have happened to you or things you wished to happen that did not take
place; it is a kind of metric by which you assess potential outcomes.You use your experience to calculate the
level of risk, which with promptitude you measure against your previous
experiences with risk taking.

If you allow yourself a high score when it comes to
successful outcomes of risk, you feel free to glow in the confidence of
believing you have good instincts.You
cannot help thinking you’ve got a handle on Reality after all, in spite of earlier
times when you’d thought your ambitions were to be things you took out only in
private, while you sat in a low-level hum of envy in the presence of
individuals who’d found ways to achieve ambitions such as yours.

If your experience with risk were somehow presented to you
in balance sheet form and your discovery was that you’d not done all that well
as a result, you don’t think you’d stop taking the kinds of risk you’ve taken
in the past.You might edit them somewhat,
look for newer risks, look for more things to factor in.But there has to be that sense of confidence
that comes from having a body of experience as a guide and so, as a part of
your wish to be a storyteller, you’d take storyteller risks, which is to say
you’d jump at what seemed relevant bridges between what you know and what you
wish to know.

One more failure cannot change you too much at this point in
your individual story arc.

You are making somewhat of a leap here with the observation
that many experiences are not always so reliable.The Mark Twain observation about a cat on a
hot stove is an exception, to which you add your own observation that
experience is not always the best teacher.It is good to be aware of your experiences but not bound by them.If history is, as some cynical observers have
suggested, outcomes written by winners, your history of wins is to be balanced
against your history of losses, to get a closer look at a true history.

It is your experience that an anticipated event, when it
takes place, is always more pleasant than anticipated or less, but your
anticipations are rare occasions of exactitude.Your anticipations of dread are afflicted in similar degree; an event is
worse or better than the dread would have you believe.

You’re amused by your reaction when some risk you’ve taken
causes a miserable result, causing you to rue not listening to your intuition,
which is based, among other things, on your experiences.You should have listened.Right.But when your risk produces a result you like, you give yourself
metaphoric pats on the back.

Go on taking risks, but as well go on being prepared to
execute second and third and fourth drafts.See yourself, either as yourself now or as an extension of yourself
through one or more of the characters you create, always in some form of
action, always questioning, always mindful of consequences, always prepared to
take the leap of risk.

If real time does not afford you the opportunity to do a
second or third draft, don’t worry, your fictionalized version of it will.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Since you were old enough to put words to such concepts,
you’ve been beleaguered and badgered by arguing neighbors wherever you
lived.The arguments on occasion reached
epic heights of acrimony, causing you to lose sleep, your ability to
concentrate, even to think out rational solutions to rational problems
perplexing you at the time.

On occasion the arguments devolved to things being thrown.

The arguments seemed to have begun at all times of the day
or night, sometimes for no apparent reason.

The arguing neighbors were, of course, you, snarling,
sniping pairs of opposites, their exchanges escalating from the relative calm
of Socratic arguments into accusation, recrimination, and at last the
exasperation of one of the parties wondering what the other expects.

You more or less solved the problem out of a need for time
to work, sleep, think, read; you also solved the problem from a growing
awareness that none of the arguing combatants was in any way malevolent or had
pernicious agendas.Quite the contrary—each
combatant thought he was right about what you needed to do next.In fact, some of the arguments had to do with
which of the combatants had your greater interests more at heart.Some of them even thought they were saving
you from life-reducing errors.

Back to conversation again, now that you’ve figured out the
opposing forces within, following them to the point where each said in effect
that you could trust it when it offered suggestions.

This is, you believe, the way it is, the roiling inner
lifestyle, as it were, playing out from one or more genomes with which our species
is encoded at birth.Sure, there are
occasional mistakes and some individuals have no inner conversations or are
swept along by inner voices of such range and intensity that they in effect
become the driver for a time.Sure.On balance, most of us, you included, develop
a social contract with these neighbors.Your friends who write are, you admit with great fondness, quite daft,
but are so in the daft ways of writers.Musicians, writers, photographers, artists, and actors have overlapping
points of interest and similarity.In
particular, this group you’ve just mentioned are all manipulators of time.There are other things attracting you to them
and them to you, thus the attraction away from ordinariness and toward the
daftness that comes from being caught up in a particular focus instead of a
particular lifestyle.

To observe that ordinary individuals do not have inner
arguments is to buy into an enormous landscape of error; the entire Homo
sapiens species has inner conflicts, some of them quite similar to your.In fact, while you are different, somewhat
apart, you are also approaching being congruent.How would you have any hope of inventing
characters that seemed lifelike if you did not have some similarity of inner
conflict with the kinds of individuals you would not object to having as
readers and, in fact, strive to understand so that you might better be able to
accomplish that relationship?

You were going to use an adjective and call the relationship
between you and your readers a happy one, but that, too, is a dangerous
judgment.You could attract readers who
find your logic, circumstances, and characters so specious as to cause them
great guffaws of mirth.

Relationships are fraught with possibilities.Nearly every relationship has the potential
for becoming metaphor for arguing neighbors.Better relationships take this aspect of the chemistry between
individuals into account.Something in
the chemistry of a close bonding causes the individuals to live in a state of
mutual accommodation.

You could advance the hypothesis that if there were no
real-time arguments among neighbors, there would be no story.Were you to do so, you’d be speaking to the
attraction of the inner narrative, as seen, heard, felt, and remembered by the
writer, the painter, the actor, the musician, the dancer, the photographer.

The “it” of the creative narrative may owe a great deal to
time—time, for instance, in the kiln, or the tempo of a composition—but it also
owes to that personalized strand of linked impressions we call design, and what
is story but a particular strand of scenes and impressions linked in a
particular pattern?

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Ambiguity has become the bored, cranky child, no longer
content to fuss in markets while mother is shopping, fussing in story while
writers are trying to compose.

The word ambiguity pries open the door to uncertainty,
indefiniteness, and inconclusive results, which go a long way toward
explanation for some of the short stories in a given issue of The New Yorker.

A banquet buffet has been ordered in anticipation—a key
prerequisite of ambiguity—of thirty participants.Four arrive, a fact that will cause the chef
pangs of anguish and frustration.Who
knew there would be only four out of an anticipated thirty?In this way, anguish and frustration join the
glorious possibilities of valence to ambiguity.Of these four arrivals to the buffet, two are offended because the
buffet is prima facie a stern rebuke to the laws of Kosher.One of the remaining two is a perfervid
vegan; the remaining guest is self-conscious about being the first one to cut
into an elaborate, two-tier Jell-O mold which is an amazing replica of a Frank
Ghery architectural design.

So easy to see how this scenario is fraught with
implications and tangents of ambiguity?

For the longest time, story had a ritual-level cargo
destined for an anticipated delivery.Then things began to happen in story in much the same way things
happened in art.Anarchists ran rampant
through the traditional forms, brandishing torches and slogan-bearing
signs.“Down with comedic endings.”In fact, “Down with Endings.”

In an analogy to the way the pointillists wanted the viewer
to do some of the work of a painting, post-modernist writers wanted the reader
to take some of the work load, supply endings the writer only hinted at.

Who knew?

You knew because you were reading as much as you could get
your hands on, foolishly thinking at first that understanding how conventions
were evolving would ease your way into publication.While it was a lovely ride and you do not
regret one minute of it (now that it is long past you and in retrospect less
ambiguous and frustrating), that was no more a way into publication than any
other form of alchemy, which is to say a method of transforming base metals
into more precious ones.The way to turn
base stories into precious ones was and has always been a blending, but not of
science and mythology or magic or even wistful thinking but rather of
individual vision and voice.

If you didn’t breathe
the life and enthusiasm of your own senses into story, you might be following
all the directions, might be assembling the equivalent of a bureau or chair
you’d purchased at Ikea, but it was doomed to the sameness and standardization
of recipes and rules, and what kind of story was that?

Ambiguity is a challenge to end your stories where they seem
to you to end rather than where you think convention calls for them to
end.Convention is much like the
watermarks you saw on buildings in places such as New Orleans and Miami,
showing where the water rose due to a particular flood in a particular year.

Do you want to go on explaining what all that dramatic
information (implications) means?Which
seems sharper, the sense that although this is a story, it could nevertheless
be happening right now, or Life is tricky enough without having to stop at
every turn to figure out what it wants?

Of course there is a third option, which says in effect that
neither life nor story can be figured out, so you might just as well go for the
emotional bang at the end that provides the most enjoyment.

If you are striving for neither too much, nor too little,
what seems the more attractive (and don’t say “entertainment.”)?

Entertainment.

Okay, that means someone in the story learns something,
which turns out to be whatever it is you’ll have learned from having written
the story.

Interesting analogy:During World War II, Navajo “Code Talkers” were used to send messages
encrypted in the Navajo language, thus to foil enemy interception and
interpretation.

Story is code for life experiences, encrypted in a language
of irony and ambiguity, then directed at readers.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The more you think about the meaning of the word “ordinary,”
the greater your conviction that it has an enormous presence in the things you
have read, read now, have written in the past, are working on now, and will
work on in the future.

You began reading in the first place to buy your way out of
ordinary events and circumstances, most of which were wrapped around the
armature of being a child of the later years of the Depression, but also
because you were buoyed up by a loving family and, with one major exception,
good schools until you hit junior high school.

You read not so much for escape—although you often did read
to escape potential boredom—as you did from curiosity.Reading was a good way to find deeper answers
to questions being lobbed at you.

You read because the characters you met in books and
magazines were to a person remarkable beyond the individuals you came in
contact with in real time.Although no
one made the equation for you—fictional individuals were more remarkable than
real persons—nevertheless you were compiling quite a score of stellar
characters.At one point, before you
were ten, your real-life heroes were Admiral Byrd, Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, and Count Basie.You
admired Gene Autry and had a boyish crush on Lana Turner.Your list of fictional friends was growing
with each book you read, a trend that has remained to this day.

Thinking about close friends, men and women who were well
beyond ordinary, you begin to see a common theme, a braid of quirkiness, moodiness,
outrageous talent, unquenchable curiosity.In nearly every case with the possible exception of Barnaby Conrad, you
did not see these friends often, but when you did there was a chemistry as of,
how shall you describe it, of meeting a new character in a book.Since about 1980, you’d have lunch at least
twice a week with BC.

Because of your wealth of reading-level friends, you had no
need of a great many real-time friends nor had you developed the techniques for
making them.The other side of the
equation became your own attempts at acquiring skills in the storytelling
craft.These attempts in an indirect but
tangible way helped you develop skills necessary to recognize fictional friends
and get them to talk to you.Early in
your publishing career, you had the opportunity to spend a few moments in
conversation with Elmore Leonard, a man who is so prolific that he has no need
of a large cadre of real-time friends.From him you learned that if you listened, characters might talk to
you.This was not all you learned
because when you began to think about it, you realized he was creating
characters as memorable, sometimes even more memorable than Dickens’s
characters.You don’t tell them what to
do, you listen to them and they will often tell you what they wish to do.This was not an easy thing to learn; nor was
it an easy thing to recognize.

You have spent a good portion of your life being ordinary
and doing ordinary things, some of which is necessary as an integral part of
growing up.Now, however, the time has
arrived for you to be as little concerned with the ordinary as possible.You experiment with stratagems to bring some
quality of out-of-the-ordinariness into every day, sometimes focusing on the
things you eat, the clothing you wear, the books you read, the stories and
books you write, the things you go out of your way to see, the things you go
out of your way to avoid.

Ordinary defeats the writer, ties lead weights to his feet,
then pushes him off the edge of a pier.A writer must think beyond ordinary in constructing a story, which is an
unequivocal directive to begin with a cast of characters who are beyond
ordinary, in particular when they are selected in order to portray ordinary
individuals.

Ordinary does not allow escape routes or opportunities for
having memorable goals, much less the intellect to contrive ways to achieve
those goals.

Ordinary means your characters are not as smart as you;
out-of-the-ordinary means they are smarter, know more than you do, think faster
than you do, solve problems that would leave you weeping with frustration.

A reasonable question becomes how it is possible to produce
characters who are smarter than you.A
reasonable answer is to cause them to think in a different way than you do,
talk in different ways, ask different questions, have different goals.

Think about how you become aware a person is smarter than
you, then think about the reasons you’re led to think so, then invest those
characters you wish to be brighter with those qualities.The big mistake is always resident in
thinking shrewdness and intelligence have to do with memorized fact.Another big mistake is thinking shrewdness
and intelligence are related to not being wrong, about making mistakes, about
embracing a hypothesis with some resident flaw.

Ordinary is being too easily pleased or never being pleased
or wanting too much to please someone or something.Ordinary is being so predictable that you are
ordinary in your boring application.

You become ordinary if you try to apply the solutions that
work in the story you’ve already completed and sent off to the story under
way.You become ordinary if you insist
on the ending and turns of event you had when you began.You lose ordinary when you write yourself out
beyond your toolkit of easy fixes and repairs and into problems where you think
you may have gone too far this time, only to realize you’ve only begun.

In metaphor, it is not ordinary to push your story vehicle
far enough away from the point of departure to have lost sight of the
shoreline, then realize you’ve left your navigation tools at home.Now you’ve done it.You’ve moved beyond ordinary.Now you’re at risk of telling a story that is
no longer ordinary.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

When you go through motions of comparing the person you
wanted to be with the person you’ve become, you begin to get a glimpse of how
remarkable the process of creating a story is.

Forgetting all about some of your preteen flights of career
imagination such as being an aeronautical design engineer, a restaurateur, an
importer of merchandise from Latin America, and a professional gambler, then
focusing on becoming a writer for the pulp magazines, you are more often than
not amazed at how it is you ever became any of the things you have or, for that
matter have not become.

Stories tend to work out in much the same way.You begin with a wrinkle in the cosmic rug,
try to smooth it down, watch with some amusement as the wrinkle spreads or
appears elsewhere, then with some aggression, seems to show deliberation in
thwarting your efforts.

You cannot think of a thing you’ve written that has come to
completion without having undergone some dramatic transformation, leading you
to the uneasy analogy that what you were experiencing when you thought you were
maturing was more than mere resting in oak barrels that once contained sherry
or bourbon or some fermenting beverage.If your stories reflect heavy rewriting and revision, your life
experiences also reflect unanticipated activity in many categories.

There were times when your visions of the techniques you
wished to acquire and the work areas where you hoped to put them to use seemed
as remote as possible, leaving you feeling at sea in an existential sea of your
own making.Nor did it help that at the
time you spent hours at the farthest reaches of Malibu beaches, where you did
not expect to find stories.

You set off on a distraction of following the carnival life
for three or four years, thinking this would fill you to the brim with material
related to the real, the apparent, and levels of human curiosity.You got one novel and, if your recollection
is accurate, two short stories plus two losses of your heart to women who were
in one way or another unavailable.

You thought yourself on to something when a side show
performer took you into her dressing room tent in order to show you a sorority
pin she claimed was authentic.Perhaps
it was, but her role in the carnival was Bimbo, the Snake Girl.By the time you met her, everything seemed an
illusion.In one way or another, you’d
learned The G or gimmick to all the

amusement concessions, leading you for a time to think all
activity, in or out of the carnival, had a G.

Then you moved to the sketchier outer reaches of the world
of television, where the carnival seemed less illusory.

Sometimes working on a story reminds you of being between
those worlds, where you pack up your words, then move to a new landscape, aware
your visions are on hold until there is some surprise explosive force.

One woman who had three booths and an Airstream trailer you
admired warned you not to get one because if you did, you’d be so comfortable
that you’d never leave the carnival.Of
an evening before a new county fair venue would open, she’d pour you Campari
and soda then extend her arm to cover the carnival lot.She told you we carneys were here because we
were uncomfortable and the people who came to us came because they were
uncomfortable.She told you that you
didn’t belong with either group, the carneys or the civilians, whom most
carneys call marks.If there were a
refill of the Campari, she’d also tell you you didn’t belong with the
comfortable people, either, not if you were what you said you were.

She was right, and you owe her for wanting you not to stay
with the carnival, but to remain somewhere among the comfortable and
uncomfortable, taking notes.

You do the equivalent of that when the paragraphs do not
seem to link together as they did when you first began setting them down in
order to see if you could decipher their meaning.

When you were a kid, you were big on maps, no doubt because
of your reading of treasure maps.Gas
stations gave maps away with such abandon that even you, as a kid, could ask
for and be given them.

Your mother was indulgent up to a point, but when your
collection of maps grew, she offered to buy you an atlas.

It all seemed random until you were nearly thirty.Then it began to make sense.Stories were starting to make sense.Maps were beginning to make sense.Even though they were of the same landscape,
they represented different ways.All you
had to do was figure them out.

If you’d had only one vision of you, it would have taken even
longer to get here.

Now that you’re here, you need to look for the G every time
you find yourself feeling comfortable.

Preface

These are notes, arguments, and attempts to resolve any lingering indecision about works in progress, things I have observed, books and stories I have read, things I wish I had done, and things I wish I had not done. They are in effect the kinds of notes I put in bottles at the beach as a kid, but this time the hoped for reader is the me of the future, browsing here for the energy and vision that got these notes down in the first place.